In 2003, the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL) signed a cooperative agreement with DevTech to implement the Combating Child Labor Through Education in the Dominican Republic project that works with the International Labor Organization, the Dominican Secretariats of Education and Labor, and other stakeholders. The program is designed to:

• Raise awareness of the importance of education for all children and to mobilize a wide array of actors to improve and expand education infrastructures;
• Strengthen formal and transitional education systems that encourage working children and those at risk of working to attend school;
• Strengthen national institutions and policies on education and child labor; and
• Ensure the long-term sustainability of these efforts.

The Dominican Republic’s Secretariat of Labor has defined the “worst forms of child labor” (WFCL) as hazardous work in agriculture, dangerous urban work in streets or sweatshops, domestic servants, child trafficking, and commercial sexual exploitation. When the Dominican government ratified ILO Convention 182, it committed to take immediate and effective measures to eliminate the WFCL within ten years. Within this framework, as well as the USDOL’s objectives, this project’s goal is to reduce the number of children involved in WFCL by 4,200—commercial sexual exploitation (450), informal urban economy (850), and dangerous agriculture (2,900)—over a four-year period. By the summer of 2006, 4,938 children had already benefited from project interventions. Targeted children include those who have either dropped out of school or attend school irregularly, with the latter group repeating grades or altogether dropping out of school.

Project Interventions

The Combating Child Labor Through Education in the Dominican Republic project is implementing interventions that address three main areas: creating a complete educational program for “the other shift,” or the other half-day; making school more relevant and attractive by providing teachers and administrators with special training and supervision; and providing vocational education to adolescents who opted out of regular schooling.

Espacios Para Crecer (“Places to Grow”)

DevTech has developed an education program to assure regular school attendance by the targeted children in the 6 to 13-age group. The project team created Espacios para Crecer (Spaces for Growth), an exciting, high quality, well-structured program with three basic components: academic leveling (focusing on math, reading, and writing), recreation (physical education, music, theater, art, and literature), and life skills. Attendance records indicate that over 95% of the targeted children attend both regular school and the Espacios para Crecer program daily, and are promoted at the end of the school year. Some children have even been promoted to a higher grade during the school year.

Teacher training

The project also focuses on the teachers of the targeted children. A three-day training course in Quantum Learning methodology has been given to 500 educators and administrators. After the first training course to 160 educators (financed with project funds), the Dominican Secretariat of Education was so impressed that it financed courses for 240 teachers and administrators while Plan International -an NGO- financed courses for 100 more teachers. (For more information on the Quantum Learning methodology, go to www.quantumlearning.com)

Vocational Education

The vocational training program targeting adolescents (14-17 years of age) presented challenges since vocational education institutions in the Dominican Republic require a basic education (8 th grade) certificate for admission and very few of the targeted adolescents had completed 8 th grade. The project team identified several institutions that were willing to offer programs to these adolescents. For example, a private institution in the city of Santiago trained 33 adolescents in pastry making, commercial sewing (tailoring), and basic computer skills. A private vocational school in Santo Domingo offered a special program for 80 adolescents during a six-week summer session. One rural school with a small computer lab provided computer skills training for adolescents in that community. In the beach community of Sosúa, 30 young women completed a six-month training course for beauty salon assistants. The project also adapted a program for micro-enterprise training that is being taught to a group of adolescents and their parents in the beach community of Las Terrenas.

The government of the Dominican Republic is committed to the 2015 Millennium Development Goals of Education for All. However, given the scarcity of resources, they are seeking to partner with the private sector to provide the Espacios para Crecer program as a half-day complement to the half-day regular school program. To ensure the sustainability of the program, DevTech and its partners have created a consortium that will assume the management of the program following the completion of USDOL funding in 2007. The consortium is currently made up of DevTech’s NGO partners, other implementing partners in country, and Secretariat of Education officials. During the next year, the consortium will focus on building alliances, as well as working with both the public and the private sector to develop funding sources to expand and sustain the program.

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